INTERVIEW: Ben Savage – Whitechapel

Few bands can boast such a remarkable evolution as Tennessee’s WHITECHAPEL. One of the vanguard of the burgeoning deathcore scene in the mid-noughties, their sound has evolved drastically from the constant breakdowns and illegible gutturals of their debut, solidifying their reputation as one of the heavyweights in modern metal. While the experimentation in sound has been hit or miss over the last several albums, WHITECHAPEL have hit their stride with The Valley (read our review here), having recorded one of the best albums in their career. We caught up with founding guitarist Ben Savage to discuss the new album, the anniversary tours for The Somatic Defilement and This Is Exile in 2017 and 2018, respectively, and the future of deathcore. 

Hey Ben, thanks for taking the time to talk today. As we’re getting closer to the release of The Valley, how is everyone in the WHITECHAPEL camp at the moment?

Ben: Everyone’s doing great, man. We’ve got some time off, tour. We’re just enjoying ourselves because last year was pretty hectic. We did European tours, a couple of US tours, we had to write a record, record [the record], we had to learn old records. So this is kind of a much needed break we’ve been looking forward to. I’m just at the house, writing some music and playing with my dogs. It’s been fun.

Mark Lewis was involved in the recording of A New Era Of Corruption, and has produced every WHITECHAPEL record since. Was there ever any question that you would continue your relationship with Mark handling the production for The Valley, or did you discuss the possibility of working with someone else?

Ben: We discussed the idea of getting someone else to mix it because we like working with Mark. He’s got a good ear for guitar tones and drum tones. He lives in Tennessee, where we’re from, so he can just like drop down and record us in Knoxville, that’s where we recorded guitars and vocals. I live in Nashville so I did my overdubs and my solos and everything at his house, he has a home studio, we went over there so we got a lot more stuff done. We also did drums in Nashville too. It was all local based, so we were able to get all the tanks we wanted and we weren’t left thinking “Oh, we could have added this here or this there.” We pretty much got whatever we needed to get on recording, which was cool.

Ben: Yeah, he was a session drummer. He has his own band going on with his with his fiance, they’re touring the world right now, having a good time so he didn’t want to mess that up. The fact that he was able to record the drums on the album was awesome. Once we found that out, it really helped us excel the song-writing process. It was up in the air for a while who was going to play on the album. So once we found out he was going to do it we were just like “All systems go. We can write whatever we want.” He could play as fast as we want, he could get as groovy as we’d like, so we kind of just went all out.

He knocked the drum tracks out in five days which is really fucking good. The last last album we did, it took almost three weeks to do the drum tracks, so having him knock them out in five days… it was something! And it enabled us to record in a nice studio, so we weren’t burning money for days and days. He was able to come in knock out like the true pro that he is. It was great man, Navene has played on some of my favourite records, like ANIMALS AS LEADERS‘ Weightless, he played on ANIMOSITY‘s Animal, that was a game changing record when it came out back in the day. But yeah, we were super stoked.

Phil [Bozeman, vocals] has touched on his childhood before in WHITECHAPEL’s lyrics, but the entirety of The Valley lyrically focuses on his childhood. Although you can’t speak fully on behalf of Phil, do you feel delving so deeply into his past with this record was a cathartic experience for him?

Ben: Yeah I feel like it was [cathartic] to think about his past. There’s a lot of deep stuff on the album that I don’t think he would have delved as hard into unless he had you know a reason to, like to write lyrics. He got one of his mum’s old journals. She suffered from multiple personality disorder, she had up to like 30 different personalities and he got one of her journals for inspiration to find lyrics. The first track from the album was based off some of the writings in those journals, When A Demon Defiles A Witch. I don’t know if he would have delved that deep, if he would have researched that stuff unless he had a reason to. But yeah, all of the album was inspired by his childhood, looking back. You can see it in the album art too, the singular eye just looking with a bird’s eye view across the valley where he grew up.

The cover art for The Valley and the promotional posters for the singles have a pretty unique, movie poster style to it. What was the idea behind the art direction there?

Ben: Phil came up with the title, and once he came up with the title, The Valley, everything sort of fell into place. We had all the music written we write the music first then Phil writes lyrics over, so it was kind of up in the air what we were going to do as far as art direction, but once he came up with the title The Valley, and once we knew we were going to have Branca Studio from Spain do the art… He has an old school style, he makes sure it looks like it came out in the mid ‘70s. He doesn’t want it to look too modern. So once we did that, and we heard the title The Valley it kind of had a Stephen King book sort of vibe. I can see Stephen King, author of The Valley or something like that.

It kind of fell into place and we were able to come up with the concept easier, just from the title alone. We saw the album was ten tracks, so I doodled some images I got in my head from reading the lyrics and I send it over to Branca and he made poster style art for it. And he’s all about packaging. He wants to make sure the packaging is the best it could be. We wanted to do some special for Europe, so in the pre–order packages there’s 11 by 17 posters of each song on the album, including the album artwork. So that’s some of the special packages you could get for the album, which is really cool. I’ve always loved that sort of thing, whenever bands do special pre-order packages. So it was cool, it all fell into place.

WHITECHAPEL have a very quick turnover between albums – the gap between Mark of The Blade and The Valley is the longest yet, and that’s only three years. Do you think you’ll continue to keep up such a quick release schedule moving forward, or do you hope to tour more heavily and enjoy more down-time between albums?

Ben: We’re pretty inspired now after making this album. We might actually have it out sooner than three years. After Mark Of The Blade we went through a drummer change, we had the This Is Exile album tours that we did, which extended the gap, so, we were able to have more time to write and compile ideas. But after this album we kind of delved deep into what we can do as far as Phil singing and that stuff and so that’s kind of inspired us to maybe put out a record sooner, keep the hype going, keep our flame lit. We’ll see, it probably will just be a couple years or something. We’re definitely more inspired now than we have been in the past with releasing albums because we’re doing new things, and once you‘re doing new things that means it’s exciting for us.

Your debut album, The Somatic Defilement, was a concept record about the Jack The Ripper murders, and The Valley is a concept album about Phil’s childhood. Do you see WHITECHAPEL doing more concept albums in the future, or do you prefer to stick to a more standard format, where each song is more self-contained?

Ben: I think we’re gonna continue the concept thing. The Valley, I think it can be extended out farther, the concept can be bigger than just one album so I think we’re going to extend the concept out farther and go deeper into that rather than just move on to something else. We found something special with this, we’re going to hone in on it, pull out as many stops as we can.

You have a run of headline dates across Europe this summer between festival appearances, including a few shows in the UK before Download Festival. Is there a full WHITECHAPEL headline tour in the works for UK/EU in support of The Valley?

Ben: It’ll more than likely be early next year. I think these will be the only UK dates we play. I know we’re playing Islington Academy in London, Download Festival at Donington and Cardiff. So if you live in UK that’ll probably the only time you catch us this year. But we’re planning on doing a full run next year, because we haven’t done that in a long time. Once we get the newer songs more tight we’ll probably do a full record set or something.

Which songs from The Valley are you particularly excited to debut live?

Ben: I like the singles that we’ve released so far. I’m looking forward to playing Hickory Creek live, because it’s a big departure for us, I feel like it’d be a real strong song in the set, a bit different to break it up. I really liked the song The Other Side, that’s a real heavy, anthemic song. We’ve always had those, but I don’t think we’ve had those as far as the energy of that song. I don’t think we really had a song with that much energy in it, which I really like. I think it’d be really cool live song, too. I love all the songs, but those two in particular.

At the end of 2017 and during 2018 WHITECHAPEL toured the USA in celebration of the ten-year anniversaries of The Somatic Defilement and This Is Exile, respectively. How was it for you to revisit those albums?

Ben: It was really cool. It was a glimpse into what we were writing back then. When we came out and wrote those albums, there was a lot of competition in our genre, there was a lot of bands. It was the MySpace days, so there was so many bands which meant tons of competition. So we were trying to separate ourselves and stand out as far as those bands go and go a little beyond because there’s a lot of different tempo changes and a lot of riffs crammed into one song. You can hear the times that we were in when you hear those records. We were all about playing fast. After our third album, A New Era Of Corruption, we experimented with changing tempos, slowing songs down and adding more melody, so you could really see the evolution in our sound through that. There wasn’t a lot of strumming, as far as guitar playing goes, on those early albums. There wasn’t a lot of strumming going on, it was more triplets and speed picking and chugging, but then later on we got into more strumming which led way to the bigger, more open sounds that are more present in the recent material.

Are there any plans for a similar tour in 2020 celebrating A New Era Of Corruption?

Ben: Yeah there’s talks about it. I don’t know if we’ll play the album all the way through, because will still be touring off The Valley but we haven’t played a lot of songs from that album so we’ll whip out a few for that ten year anniversary.

WHITECHAPEL are widely regarded as one of the most important names in deathcore, alongside SUICIDE SILENCE, CARNIFEX and JOB FOR A COWBOY. But like those bands, your sound has progressed far beyond the typical blueprints of deathcore. Do you see deathcore, as you played it on your earlier albums, having a future in the metal scene?

Ben: If bands do it well, it’s all about how good you do it. As far as we go, our first three records are pretty deathcore, and then the three records after sort of dipped into a more modern kind of sound. It still had deathcore elements because low-tuned guitars and growling is the blueprint for deathcore. With our new sound the elements are still there, but we’ve kind of strayed away [the original deathcore sound], but our first three albums are really based around that deathcore sound.

We’re kind of trying to do our own thing. I don’t want to think about the deathcore genre because I don’t really listen to that sort of music to get inspiration, I listen to other genres. That deathcore sound was popular when we started and we were a deathcore band because that’s the music we were into. But we’re into different things now, and we’re doing our own thing, so I don’t know. There’s something to like in every genre of music.

Are there any underground death metal or deathcore bands you are particularly impressed by at the moment, either in the Tennessee scene or further afield?

Ben: RIVERS OF NIHIL, I really, really like that band, I love that band. They put out a great record last year, Where Owls Know My Name. As far as our style of music goes, they do it in a more death metal sort of way, they never had those breakdowns or anything. KATATONIA, but they’re not a new band, they’ve been around since the early ‘90s, but I’m really influenced by them. We all listen to different bands and it all plays into one. I’m more of a progressive metal guy, Alex [Wade, guitar] is more of a heavy, down-tuned groove guy like MESHUGGAH and DEFTONES. Our guitar Zach [Householder] is more of a traditional metal guy, he likes black metal and that sort of underground stuff, our bass player Gabe [Crisp] is more of the layman guy in the band. He’ll let you know if a song has gone too out there, he’ll reel it in. We all listen to different sorts of stuff, there’s cool music to be found everywhere.

Thanks once again for your time today Ben. Finally, do you have any parting messages for Distorted Sound’s readers?

Ben: Give our album The Valley a listen, and thank you for reading this interview. Thanks for your interest.

The Valley is out now via Metal Blade Records. WHITECHAPEL are featured in our latest digital issue. Read the feature by subscribing to our Patreon Page. 

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